Today on the podcast I sit down with my old friend Dan Berstein to talk about mental health. We talk about his personal experiences with bipolar disorder, we discuss different perspectives on mental health and we dive into some of the work he has done as a mental health professional, most recently as a mediator focusing on communication and conflict resolution in mental health.

Just a little background about Dan. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in college at the age of 19 after a manic episode. Since then, he has spent 10 years learning about communities in mental health and developing skills that could help improve how people communicate about mental health issues and the different perspectives in mental health. He spent some time in law school and learned about mental health law, he interned at The Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, and he studied at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in the mental health department to learn more about the science of mental illness and mental disorders. He trained as a mediator with the New York Peace Institute and sat on their mediator advisory board where he learned more about different conflict resolution processes. He has been a facilitator and operations committee member of the Mood Disorders Support Group of New York where he facilitated support groups for people living with bipolar disorder, unipolar depression, anyone with any kind of mental disorder under 30 and their family members and supporters. He hosted The National Dialogue on Mental Health in their first event in NYC and the first one around the country that brought together different stakeholders and then he was asked to give a webinar for all the future event organizers to learn how to do the same. He has given trainings to mediators in over 10 states and has facilitated webinars for the National Association for Community Mediation and for the federal government teaching people about how to communicate better about mental health issues.

In this episode, Barry Shore takes us through his incredible journey of healing from a rare disease known as Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) that suddenly left him completely paralyzed over a decade ago. After the rapid onset of the paralysis that resulted from GBS, Barry spent months in the hospital as doctors first had to stop the disease in its tracks and then had to assist him in beginning the long recovery process.

One of the striking and key pieces to Barry’s story of recovery are the many amazing people that have been there for him along the way. There are the doctors and the other medical practitioners who administered great care to him, fought for him to get the best equipment possible and even created new gadgets to improve his stay in the hospital when all he could do was blink an eye. There are his friends and other members of the community who pushed him to begin aquatic therapy to regain movement, which served to kickstart his passion for swimming and the water (he now spends many hours a week in the pool and has swam over 5,000 miles). There is his aide, who I had the privilege of meeting that day and he has been with Barry for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week for almost a decade. And most importantly, Barry has had his family and wife, who have been his greatest allies in this process, doing everything from bringing him home-cooked meals for every single meal during his months in the hospital to turning him over in bed throughout the night during the early days of his recovery.

But this story is also very much about Barry himself and his approach to life. I quickly realized when speaking with Barry that his own mindset has been an essential tool in his entire healing process. As he says, he is an “oozer.” He oozes optimism, happiness and JOY! He is also extremely grateful for the gifts that life has given him and he seems to constantly be expressing that. I have no doubt that this optimism and outlook on life were key components in enabling Barry to so triumph on his incredible journey of recovery.

It was a real pleasure to meet Barry and I found this to be an inspiring story not just of healing, but also of living each day to the fullest and building a mindset that allows you to do just that.

Today on the podcast I sit down with my younger sister Jen (AKA Unicorn, Power Betch, etc.). The more time passes, the more this kid continues to impress me. When I look at where she was four or five years ago – deep in the throes of her struggle with depression – and where she is today, it’s hard not to appreciate how far she has come. She still has many of the same daily struggles that she has had her entire life, but through hard work, introspection and dedicating both her studies and work to helping others, she has taken major strides to create a more purposeful and fulfilling life.

Mental illness is something that is rarely talked about and I think it is still largely misunderstood in our society. There is little done to educate children and families about these things, so people struggling with any type of mental illness often do not have the support system they need from their communities. In addition, the resources offered by schools in this area might be slim to none, so there might not be anywhere to turn to receive the necessary help and guidance.

Having conversations like this is one of the ways I hope that we can begin to break down the barriers surrounding mental illness and hopefully begin to create a stronger community for the people who really need it. If you have any personal experience with mental illness, either yourself or through a close friend or family member, it would be great to hear from you in the comments below.

Today on the podcast we have “pseudo-Uncle” Jack, a very close and old friend of my family. In this episode we step back almost 20 years to the time of his divorce. He shares insight based on what he experienced during that time and he discusses the pain, confusion, anger and frustration that he went through both as a parent and on a personal level. Since he was a father trying to raise two teenage daughters in the middle of all this, he also has some entertaining stories about trying to navigate those moments as well. Both of his kids are now happily married, they each have two great kids and Jack (and his ex-wife) are both enjoying their lives as grandparents. At the end of the day, everybody survived.